Futuremark seems to have delisted the scores of Samsung and HTC products from its public benchmark listings over new allegations of performance doping. According to a recent report by Tony Smith of the Register, Futuremark accused the two companies of rigging results in its 3DMark GPU benchmarking app for Android. The company removed the scores of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet and Note III phablet as well as HTC’s One and One Mini smartphones, dropping the models to the bottom of its listings, below devices with a score of zero (above).

The president of Futuremark, Oliver Baltuch, told the site the following:

People rely on Futuremark benchmarks to produce accurate and unbiased results. That's why we have clear rules for hardware manufacturers and software developers that specify how a platform can interact with our benchmark software. In simple terms, a device must run our benchmarks without modification as if they were any other application.

Futuremark’s rules stated the following:

"The platform may not detect the launch of the benchmark executable" and that devices "must not alter, replace or override any parameters or parts of the test, nor modify the usual functioning of the platform based on the detection of the benchmark."

With the changes in place, the leading device in Futuremark’s listings remains the Samsung Galaxy Round, version of the Note III with a curved body and screen and lacking a stylus. The low volume product is offered in Korea for close to $1,000, essentially as a technology demonstration.

For those of you who didn’t know, this already happened before too. Samsung was previously caught faking benchmark scores for the Exynos 5 version of the Galaxy S4 as well as its Galaxy Note 3 using a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and its Galaxy 3 10.1 powered by an Intel CloverTrail+ processor. This kind of benchmark fudging is a practice that is opposed by Qualcomm and Intel as noted by the folks over at AnandTech, which called for attention to the benchmark doping in its testing this summer.

Samsung on the other hand issued multiple contradictory denials that it wasn’t doing anything wrong and certain Android fan sites also seemed to have defended the practice. Although the difference in numbers that such cheating produces appears to be small, it allows Samsung to claim for example, a performance edge over Apple’s iPhone 5C with its own Galaxy S4 flagship model, when in reality the S4 is about the same or scores slightly lower when it tested without being able to cheat.

The point of a benchmark is to see how a device performs against another in real life usage. Im glad Futuremark is doing this and hope Samsung/HTC learn from their mistake. I dont care what a devices hardware is CAPABLE of, I care about WHAT IT ACTUALLY DOES on a day to day basis under normal usage.